LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

a wedding present from one of the Jaspert cousins.

      Eleven o’clock.

      She folded up her embroidery without glancing at the soft blues and purples of the pansy she had completed this evening. Peter hadn’t telephoned, but that could mean anything. If he had gone to the House he might be attending a debate, or meeting colleagues from any of the committees he served on. If he had gone on to his club from the City, he might be drinking with his friends, and simply have forgotten the time. Either way, she would not wait up for him. It was a decision Isabel was making increasingly often, and as it always did it brought both relief and a twist of regret.

      Slowly she went upstairs and made herself go mechanically through the routines she had laid down for herself, creaming her face and hands and brushing out her hair until it crackled under the bristles. When she had finished Isabel looked at her face in the mirror. It seemed that the roundness of girlhood had disappeared and the new face was hollower, and sadder. Perhaps if she had her hair cut off, so that she looked as sleek and shiny as enamel, it would give her back some of the confidence that seemed to be ebbing away with every day of her marriage.

      Isabel glanced at the door of Peter’s dressing-room, connecting his bedroom to hers, and suddenly heard the silence of the house. It had been with her all evening, ever since the solitary formal dinner she had eaten with Peter’s place laid and unoccupied at the other end of the table.

      Yes, she would have her hair cut off.

      The silence stretched on, mockingly unpunctured by her small decisions. It wouldn’t make a fraction of difference, Isabel thought, whether she cut her hair or not.

      She was lonely here, amongst her pretty furniture and her china and pictures and flowers.

      Isabel hung up her robe and got into bed, and then lay quietly looking round the room before turning off her light. It was all just as she had expected it would be, and yet in the midst of all the things, nothing like it at all. Usually when her thoughts ran on like this Isabel forced herself to turn them aside, but tonight a new fear made her want to confront them.

      She had never tasted loneliness before she was married, and she had never dreamed that it would be lying in wait for her. She had believed, in all her innocence, that marriage would be a communion between herself and Peter forever. She had imagined that they would live in their lovely house, well provided with friends and families, but still within a core containing just the two of them.

      It wasn’t like that, Isabel had discovered. The core was rotten.

      When she wasn’t lonely, when Peter was with her, what she mostly felt was fear.

      She made her racing thoughts slow down so she could consider that.

      She was afraid of her own husband, and she had been afraid of him since their wedding night. The fear bred the loneliness, and the loneliness increased her fear. It had grown all through their time in Italy. The loveliness of the place had made it worse for her because the beautiful days only faded and brought the nights again.

      None of the careful descriptions she had read, nor Adeline’s little talks, had prepared her for those nights. When she had imagined it, Isabel had thought that married love with Peter would be gentle and slow, a tender expression of his feeling for her. He had been careful of her during their engagement. And yet, once she was in his bed he took her body as if it was his by right. And her body recoiled from the coarse touch of his hot flesh, from the taste of his breath and the weight of him pinning her down, and his painful, blunt invasion of it.

      At first she had tried to tell him that the things he did hurt and frightened her. Embarrassment, and a reluctance to hurt him, made her explanations vague and faltering. Peter had been embarrassed too, and his embarrassment made him angry. Isabel began to see that he didn’t know how to control himself when he was aroused, and he simply deflected with anger and impatience all the questions they might have asked one another.

      Worse, as the weeks of their honeymoon went by, Isabel understood something else about him. Her very reluctance, and the way she shrank from his big body, only aroused him further. When he saw that she was afraid, he seemed to need to take her more violently still. She knew that he would never admit that, even if he understood it himself.

      So Isabel protected herself with a barrier of passivity, a pretence that she felt nothing. Now that they were at home again she had devised a set of wifely rules that she made herself obey every night. If she could do everything she was supposed to do in preparing for bed, without hurrying or skipping anything, and still be asleep before he lumbered into her room, well, then, that was perfectly fair. But she mustn’t pretend. If she was still awake when he came to her, she would let him, and she would stare over her husband’s shoulder into the soft darkness. She would lie still and try to fight back the nausea, and suppress her longing to scream out and struggle away from underneath him.

      In the beginning, the daytimes were better. There were enough times when they were comfortable together, as they had been before the wedding. Peter was simply her husband, as she had dreamed he would be, on the evenings when they entertained successfully, or sat quietly together in their drawing room with the clock ticking. At those times Isabel had felt that their lives could, after all, be salvaged. Then the nights came, and the weight of her guilt at her sexual inadequacy and her revulsion, inextricably connected, came down on her again. There weren’t many comfortable times now.

      They couldn’t talk about it. It seemed, already, much too late.

      There was something else too.

      Isabel had always thought that she would be pleased, when the time came, and proud. Yet the probability ahead of her loomed like a threat tonight. If she had a baby it would be born of the secret, hideous core of her marriage that she was trying so hard to conceal.

      Isabel started guiltily. The silence was broken. Downstairs the front door slammed and she listened for and then heard the sound of Peter’s steps. It was too late to turn the light off. He would have seen it from the street, and anyway it was against the rules she had set for herself.

      Hastily she picked up a copy of Vogue from her bedside table and began to flick through it, listening. Peter came heavy-footed up the stairs and then went into his bathroom down the corridor. Isabel heard the lavatory flush and waited, discovering that she was holding her breath. Once or twice Peter had gone straight into his bedroom and, from the sound of it, gone to sleep immediately. But tonight the footsteps sounded too firm and steady for that.

      A moment later her door swung open. Peter was red-faced and his black tie was crooked, but his eyes were steady as he stared in at her.

      ‘Waiting up, eh? That’s heart-warming.’

      Isabel put her magazine down and said in a neutral voice, ‘You’re very late, darling. Have you been somewhere important? I was rather expecting you for dimmer.’

      Peter steadied himself on the way with a hand out to Isabel’s spoon-backed chair and then plumped down on to the bed. Isabel moved her legs away from the weight of him. He was frowning as he bent to untie his shoes.

      ‘Don’t for God’s sake start cross-questioning me before I’m in the house. I’ve been to the Coles’ for dinner, if you must know. Met him at the club and then went back on the spur of the moment.’

      ‘Couldn’t you have telephoned?’ Isabel asked mildly. ‘I would have liked to come too.’

      Peter flung his shoes into the corner and then stripped off his jacket and shirt. ‘You made no secret of not liking them when I did take you. Why go through the performance again?’

      It was true enough, Isabel thought. Sylvia Cole was strident, and Peter’s close friend Archer Cole was an ambitious politician whose climb up the parliamentary ladder had left him no time for finesse or social graces except when it suited him to switch them on.

      Was an evening with Peter in their company preferable to being left at home alone? Isabel didn’t know, any more. At least she would have been with her husband, as a wife should be. And now he was turning on her with his bright blue eyes reddened with food and

Скачать книгу